Sudan is bleeding out in the worst spiral of violence since the start of the civil war

Indiscriminate killing of civilians, sieges of entire villages, sexual assaults, mass poisonings and reports of ethnic cleansing. Sudan is bleeding out from a civil war that has witnessed unprecedented levels of violence since it erupted in April 2023. With the end of the seasonal rains, the conflict has intensified with more killings, bombings and intense fighting over territory disputed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia and the Sudanese regular army with its allied armed groups. Meanwhile, the possibility of sitting around a negotiating table to agree on a ceasefire is becoming more distant by the day.

The latest death toll in what is now the largest active conflict in sub-Saharan Africa stands at over 61,000 people during the first 14 months of the war, according to research published this month by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This figure triples the estimates previously made by the United Nations. The UN Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo has blamed both sides of the conflict for the violence. “Certain purported allies of the parties are enabling the slaughter in Sudan. This is unconscionable, it is illegal, and it must end,” she said during an appearance before the Security Council.

The violent episodes are competing in terms of atrocity. In Gezira State, dozens of villages have been under siege for a month in revenge for the defection of a senior RSF commander to the army, as documented by numerous NGOs and media outlets. In addition to the more than 135,000 displaced people caused by these raids, 40 decomposed bodies were found in the village of Al Sariha, killed by the residents themselves as they returned to their homes, days after an RSF attack in which the militia killed some 140 people. In Wad Ashayb, at least 69 civilians were killed by gunfire last Tuesday, and a week earlier 315 deaths were recorded in Al Hilaliya, with 295 attributed to poisoning according to the Sudanese government.

“The water killed them immediately, so it was not just contamination. It was clearly poisoned,” the Sudanese ambassador to Spain, Maha Ayoub, said during a recent meeting with several media outlets, including EL PAÍS, at the embassy headquarters in Madrid. Some of the victims of these alleged poisonings were the grandparents, uncles and cousins of one of the diplomats on the ambassador’s team present at the meeting. Tom Perriello, U.S. special envoy to Sudan, has also spoken about these poisonings: “To poison food in a country already suffering from famine is an especially heinous act. If confirmed, [RSF head] General Hemedti & all of the RSF leadership need to answer for this,” he said on his X account.

Meanwhile, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warns that the number of refugees has exceeded three million, an unprecedented figure since the war began on April 15, 2023. In total, an estimated 11 million people, almost 30% of the population, are displaced in the country, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM); nearly 25 million people need humanitarian assistance, at least 750,000 are on the brink of famine, and more than 800 have died from cholera. At an emergency meeting of the Security Council at the end of October, UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared himself alarmed by the “utter humanitarian catastrophe.” Dominique Hyde, UNHCR’s director of external relations, recently visited the refugee camps on the border with Chad and explains by telephone that the humanitarian situation is “desperate, with continuous bloodshed.” This is, she says, “the worst civilian protection crisis in the world in decades.”

In Khartoum state, which was seized by rebel militias at the start of the conflict, violence has also increased, coinciding with the first advances by the Sudanese Armed Forces to retake territory. In the bloodiest incident, at the beginning of November, at least 73 civilians were killed and more than 200 wounded in two air strikes by the army on the towns of Omdurman and Ombada, west of the capital. The INGO Sudan Forum, which represents 70 NGOs in the country, has denounced that the warring parties have significantly intensified the use of air strikes. “Barrel bombs were used, decimating homes, markets and stores. Some victims died in fires set off by the attacks,” the organization said in a statement.

Fear of genocide in Darfur

In Darfur, where the RSF controls almost all the major towns, there are fears of a repeat of the 2003 genocide against non-Arab minorities. The latest report by the UN Fact-Finding Mission alleges that paramilitary forces have committed war crimes, including rape, sexual slavery, kidnapping, recruitment of minors, looting and pillaging. They have done so with particular cruelty against the Masalit minority of El Geneina, whose members have been killed, tortured and raped. “I was told over and over that the women were assaulted, raped and stripped of their belongings because of their gender and ethnicity. One survivor told the Fact-Finding Mission that her assailant told her: ‘We will make Masalit girls give birth to Arab boys’ after raping her inside her house at gunpoint,” the report reads. “This attack was based on their ethnicity. They saw men and children killed. Women raped as they fled,” says Hyde of conversations she had with Masalit survivors.

Meanwhile, the prospect of a ceasefire is becoming increasingly remote; the Sudanese Armed Forces did not even send a delegation to the latest U.S.-led talks in Geneva in September. The ambassador says the government will not sit down at the negotiating table until the RSF complies with the Jeddah agreements of November 2023, aimed at ensuring the protection of civilians. Perriello travelled to Port Sudan last week to try to increase the flow of aid to the country.

One of the reasons why the Sudanese government was absent from these talks was the inclusion of the United Arab Emirates, given reports of the country’s military support for the RSF. Moreover, recent research by Amnesty International has identified French-made military technology on the battlefield in Sudan, in particular in armored vehicles used by the RSF, in what is likely a violation of the UN arms embargo on Darfur.

Ayoub also insists that the international community should consider the RSF a terrorist group, similar to Islamic State or Boko Haram. “The Sudanese government has explained from the beginning of the conflict that the RSF is a terrorist militia and must be condemned, and the international community cannot behave as if both sides were equal. If this would not be acceptable in any other country, why would it be in Sudan?” she asks.

The war in Sudan pits two high-ranking military officers against each other: the army chief and de facto leader in the country, Abdel Fattah al Burhan, and his former ally and number two, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), now leader of the RSF, formalized as a paramilitary organization that emerged from the former Janjaweed militias, which committed the worst atrocities during the previous conflict in Darfur. The two joined forces to seize power after the overthrow of former President Omar al-Bashir in 2019, but they became estranged and conflict broke out in 2023.

Now, after 18 months of fighting, the country is split into two zones: the RSF control almost the entire Darfur region, a large part of the capital, and parts of Kordofan in the south. For its part, the Sudanese army regulates the north and east, and the government has moved the capital to Port Sudan, on the coast of the Red Sea.

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